Man… I’ll keep the novel short. I was really interested in what I would later learn was the Szarkowski canon, but my professors having come from a very postmodern perspective were not interested in revisiting or deepening or complicating any of that MoMA photo stuff. Someone like Earlie Hudnall was living down the street and we were never told about him. Geoff Winningham was teaching about one neighborhood over and we were never told about him. Provoke never came up. Magnum never came up. Atget was seen as a joke that the Surrealists played on the world. We saw bits in photo history, but in studio these were not traditions that really came up. So I was making photographs against the current. Then you throw in the very important factor that all but one (and an important one she turned out to be) were white Americans with very little curiosity past their own educations, and school was often painful.